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| SCHRODINGER’S LITTER BOX
If the outcome of a circumstance is presently unknown and by observing the circumstance you will disrupt it, then it exists in all possible states simultaneously This early morning Shrodinger left the litter box unlatched. Predictably his cat escaped and the rest is problematical. My window happened to be in an open state which that wandering cat happened upon. He jumped through it and on to my bed, then sat on its haunches over my chest and stared down at me. Behold, the observed now observes the observer. What next? He could purr at me or poke my eyes out. I could slowly reach for grandpa’s old radium-dial watch and scare the beast away, or maybe not. But such effort is bound to fully waken me and force me to face yet another good or bad day. Possibilities, possibilities, I tired of facing a future of coin flips and dice rolls. Stark impossibility would be a salve to my stability. True, absolute certainty certainly produces an ennui of somnolence, but I like sleepwalking through life half dead. So shoo Schrodinger’s cat. But for once that feline is steadfast in its place and time. I’m eye to eye with unblinking fickleness. I’ll pull the covers over my face like a mortician pulls sheets over the dead. Now I grin, for life becomes wholly my own undertaking. Who knows, the dead might also be secretly grinning under their sheets, glad that’s it’s definitively over. After all, no observer on one side of the sheet can see the perversions of the observed on other side. The cat is out of my sight, and I’m out of his. Maybe it’s gone, maybe not. A paradox, all this guessing keeps me jumpy as an alley cat, yet I seek the comfort of snoring certainty. |
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| Richard Fein |
| Richard Fein was Finalist in The 2004 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition and has been published in many web and print journals, including Southern Review, Morpo Review, Oregon East Southern Humanities Review, Touchstone, Windsor Review, Maverick, Parnassus Literary Review, Small Pond, Kansas, Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Exquisite Corpse, Terrain and many others. He is also interested in digital photography and has published many of his photos, samples of which can be found at http://www.pbase.com/bardofbyte |
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